


Wheat and Cornsilk

by pascallionsbox



Category: Middlegame - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon, as in takes place literally as soon as the book ends lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:08:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23962090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pascallionsbox/pseuds/pascallionsbox
Summary: Order returns to chaos, chaos returns to order. In the collapse of everything he's ever known, Tim holds on to his sister, gets up, and walks.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	Wheat and Cornsilk

**Author's Note:**

> I know this book came out a year ago but I read it super fast literally like *yesterday* and was suddenly possessed by an all-consuming need to write this. I've barely had time to really dwell on the book so really this was me just working through all my emotions on it because I got REALLY excited about the symbolism behind the 2nd gen kids' hair colors. I didn't exactly proofread and I wrote a lot of this at like 2 am so here's hoping it's coherent lol
> 
> Here's my love letter for this book.

Order burns away into disorganized ash, returning atoms to their chaos once more. Somewhere in the universe, far far away from here, there is the soft, subtle, impossible click of their reunion.

As they walk through that cornfield, the only home Tim has ever known explodes into flames behind them.

Or rather, it's the only _place_ Tim has ever known. Countless descriptors and synonyms for the place he's lived all his life crowd at the edge of his brain, eager and ripe for the picking as always. Words aren’t supposed to fail him and yet, he can’t quite find one with the right connotation to explain his emotions. Perhaps if he and Kim had manifested like Reed wanted to, he could have. Instead, empty phrases run through his brain meaninglessly. Shelter. Bunker. Prison. Laboratory. Experiments. Endless rooms upon rooms upon rooms. James Reed. Familiarity.

Tim has no love for the place he has spent the entirety of his life in, only memories upon memories of tests and examinations, of needles and knives breaking skin, of being torn _away_ from Kim, away from his sister. Yet, he finds himself struggling not to look back as everything he has ever known is engulfed in flames. The impossibility of his emotions threaten to well up inside him, the ash of his past settling in and choking his throat.

He cannot go back, not ever. He both mourns and rejoices in this. He and Kim were trapped there, yes, but it was the one place they ever existed. They've never had to exist anywhere else. They were never allowed to.

The language flies through his mind ceaselessly. Order returns to chaos, chaos returns to order, decay, entropy, collapse. 

He casts his eyes around, still careful to not look behind him despite the flickering heat calling at his back. The clear blue sky stretches on endlessly, above the likewise golden fields of corn. The blaze that erupted from the shed they emerged from lights up the fields with a reddish tinge.

Tim's entire life has been nothing but a crumbling cliff side that has only ever had two footholds: Kim, and Reed's legacy. The loss of the latter leaves him unbalanced and wavering, clinging tightly to Kim's arm as they wade through the corn. His sister says nothing, marching onward through the endlessly yellow fields. She is a math child, that pale white, almost green of her hair reflecting the firelight in what would normally be a distracting array. However, out here, Kim almost seems to blend into the golden-green of the corn, like she could duck down and disappear any moment. He tightens his grip on her arm a little more.

How fitting is it that his hair is a dirty wheat blonde and hers a cornsilk green? They are children of these fields, born, raised, and trapped underneath them for all eternity. They are the hollow men T.S. Eliot spoke of, headpieces stuffed with straw, cursed to dance round and round this facade of living until they fall apart. 

Could they even exist anywhere outside of this place, of the laboratory? Outside barely even existed for him as a real construct outside of his books. Outside was something reserved specifically for real people. Were they people enough to exist outside? Wasn't that the whole point of their creation? That they weren't? 

He and Kim were meant to host the Doctrine, to _become_ the idea of what they represent. Without it, they are just empty husks playing at being human.

He's never been outside of the facility before, outside of its endless maze of hallways and darkness, of concrete walls and linoleum tiles. There are so many dizzying, nuanced colors out here, Tim feels a bit sick.

Reed called them his cuckoos, _his_ gods in the making. Neither of them have ever wanted that but still, how could they just be turn around and be people now? They weren't made to be people. They weren't taught how to be.

He glances at Kim, whose eyes are fixated on the two people in front of them, leading the way. Roger and Dodger's names rhyme like theirs, a clear indicator that they too were created to be a pair of Reed's pawns. Their rhyme is a bit more simplistic than Kimberly and Timothy but the power they radiate is anything but that. The woman’s frizzy red curls burning brighter than the firelight around them draw his attention first, the way Kim’s hair draws his. Dodger is the math child of the pair. She strides through the corn with ease, those gray-white eyes running countless calculations for each step and movement she makes. She is the one leading the way, somehow knowing exactly where they are and where to go in this endless field. Almost gliding through the corn, she would seem untouchable if not for her brother holding onto her arm.

Roger’s hold on his own sister is light and casual, nothing at all like Tim’s white-knuckled own on Kim. The act is borne from familiarity and comfort rather than necessity, as if that is Roger’s natural state of being. He follows Dodger at a relaxed pace, unafraid of being separated. Or rather, like he can’t even fathom the very concept of someone or something separating the two of them. Even if they were, it would be impossible to stop them from reuniting. They are the fully manifested Doctrine, after all, and the only man ever foolish enough to try lies a burning corpse miles and miles underneath them.

 _“Anywhere but here_ , _”_ Kim had answered when they had been deciding where to go. She’s always been the one to fight back against the current as Tim dragged behind, struggling just to float. She marches on, albeit a bit shaky from exhaustion, standing a little taller and straighter than she normally would. Her eyes follow Dodger as if trying to mimic her half of the Doctrine. The future has always held more math, more numbers for her to solve. There was no point in looking to the past; she’s already been there, solved that.

Tim is language, escaping the literal nightmare of his life through the novels carefully curated for him. He clings to these time capsules of paper and ink, of words already spoken, as a lifeline. And he doesn’t want to go back, he _really_ doesn’t want to go back. But the past is something safe and familiar. As terrified as he was of both of them, at least he knew what to expect with Reed and Leigh. Out here, it’s just him and Kim against two unpredictable strangers.

Or well, that’s not true, is it? Roger stands with far more confidence than he could ever imagine having, but Tim can see the way the man’s eyes scan their surroundings over and over, hungrily drinking in the visuals despite the fact that there is nothing but corn and sky as far as the eye can see. He recognizes the subtle, barely there movements of Roger’s mouth and knows that descriptions and synonyms and _words_ are running through his brain. When he finally runs out, the avatar of Language will simply switch to another and exhaust Greek, French, Tagalog, testing the sounds of the words out on tiny whispers until he is satisfied. Tim does the same at night to tire himself out at night, quietly so as to not wake up his sister. This background process is so achingly familiar, part of Tim wants to step closer to hear a little better. To see the way the languages have molded this man into the god that he is.

He stays by Kim, trailing behind the halves of the Doctrine of Ethos at least a little warily. Still, he sees the echoes in the Math children as well, recognizing the way Dodger touches her fingers together, almost as if she were cradling a ball. She constantly taps her fingertips in pairs against their mirrored counterpart, a rhythm of 1-2-3-4-5. 

“ _It’s grounding._ ” Kim had explained once on a night where neither of them could fall asleep. There were a lot of those kind of nights, when the two of them were crammed onto the same bunk, too terrified to be apart another second because Reed or Leigh had separated them once more for some cruel and inane reason or test. “ _It’s easy to get lost in the math, so sometimes, you need to remember that there’s a body to return to.”_

All of this still feels too surreal, almost dream-like. He looks at both Roger and Dodger, a pair of twins exuding power and confidence. They look to be in their 30s yet their pale, grey eyes seem old beyond measure. They’ve had the time to grow into their knobby knees and awkward angles, a concept that seems so impossible for Kim and him. 

Tim has always felt like a wounded animal in a cage, frightened at anything that could so much as rattle the bars. Kim was the one that would lash out, biting back at the hands coming to prod and tear them apart. Even now, he ducks behind Kim a bit whenever one or both of the Doctrine turn around to look at them. The outside world is so big and bright and there’s only more to see because oh god, they’re finally reaching the end of the cornfield, aren’t they? Roger grins at the sight of the dirt road and the dusty bus stop and quickens his pace, Dodger laughing as she is pulled along. 

Tim still feels the animal clawing from inside his chest, trembling and desperately begging to go back and cower in a familiar corner somewhere. Then, Kim gently shakes him off her arm and terror rises up like bile in his throat because _everything_ is changing and so is she, the one constant in his life-- But she’s just readjusting so that she can slide her hand into his. She gives him a comforting squeeze, holding onto him just as tightly as he holds onto her.

“Are you ready?” Kim asks quietly, eyes searching his. She wants to know if he’s okay, her real question buried underneath the spoken words. She doesn’t ask it though, because they both know that neither of them have ever been okay in all fifteen years of their lives. The answer wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The world doesn’t care if you’re okay.

You just need to be ready.

He nods once. It’s a too sharp and forced action that hurts his neck a bit. He doesn’t feel ready, but that didn’t matter either. Feeling ready was separate from being ready.

His voice is feeble and rough from disuse after they separated him from Kim and locked him in isolation. But words have power so he says,

“I’m ready. Let’s go.”

And so the children of wheat and cornsilk step out of the fields of Asphodel’s legacy and, for the first time in their entire lives, onto a road of their own.

**Author's Note:**

> They ARE the children of the corn, jk plz don't @ me, i actually don't read horror bc im a coward. I headcanon that because Kim and Tim are not exact copies of Roger and Dodger, Kim does have depth perception and Tim is not colorblind. However, I bet they're missing something else that goes along with Language/Math that I haven't quite figured out yet. 
> 
> Assuming people still look at this tag, come yell with me about this book @onawhimsicot on Tumblr!  
> Thanks for reading.


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